HBO Apologizes For George Bush’s Head On A Spike In Game Of Thrones Scene

In the 10th episode of the first season of Game of Thrones, Redditor SidIncognito spotted that one of the heads on the spike decorating King’s Landing belonged to ex-president George Bush.

Show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss made no effort to hide this. They actually confirmed in their DVD commentary that the decapitated head is indeed George W. Bush:

“The last head on the left is George Bush. George Bush’s head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. It’s not a choice, it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had around.”

See, they “just had to use whatever head we had around” and it just so happened that George Bush’s head was available! Seems like a perfectly good explanation to me! Of course that hasn’t stopped an uproar from breaking out over the whole thing.

In response to the uproar, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss explained further and issued an apology:

What happened was this: we use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.

In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.

Additionally, HBO also issued the following statement yesterday:

We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.

Below is the scene in question with Benioff and Weiss’ commentary from the DVD.